TBS Cut Off The Ending Of 'Jingle All the Way' (Good.)
If you haven't seen the 1996 Arnold Schwarzenegger holiday comedy Jingle All the Way lately, that's normal. With a 15% score on Rotten Tomatoes, it's officially Not a Good Movie, thanks in large part to a balls-out ridiculous ending that features the Terminator, dressed in an action figure suit complete with a real jetpack, zipping around the Minneapolis skyline like a balloon that's just had the air let out of it. Refresh your memory with this only mildly edited clip:
That's why it's so strange that, when TBS recently aired the movie, viewers were outraged that a technical error resulted in the credits rolling a good 10 minutes before they were supposed to.
It may have been an accident, but if anything, they should have cut even more. If the movie ends with Arnold announcing his child the winner of the toy, it's a better movie by an order of magnitude. Ideally, it would then skip to baby Anakin Skywalker giving the toy away to the clearly unstable Sinbad, who apparently needs it more to illustrate the true meaning of Christmas and also avoid getting blown up like that radio station, but we can safely assume that guy is in jail for, you know, blowing up the radio station. If it's a choice between sacrificing the moral of the story and taking a hard left into Looney Tunes territory, then light that pyre up.
This isn't a bold assertion: The consensus of Rotten Tomatoes is that "Arnold Schwarzenegger tries his best, but Jingle All the Way suffers from an uneven tone, shifting wildly from a would-be satire on materialism to an antic, slapstick yuk-fest." Without the bizarrely cartoonish ending and special effects that were terrible even by 1996 standards (for context, Titanic came out the next year), it's a fine holiday movie. Not a classic by any means, but an addition to your holiday viewing agenda free from any weird "How do I not remember this part?" moments. As it is, it was nominated for a Razzie and multiple Stinkers Awards. Did you even know the Stinkers were a thing? It's such a bad movie that it's making us learn stuff, which is truly unacceptable.
Top image: 20th Century Fox
